Clinical space at a hospital, such as a surgical suite, is typically crowded with various medical personnel and large pieces of equipment occupying the space. Many medical personnel may need to be present during the performance of a clinical procedure; however, routine monitoring or imaging examinations may only demand nurses or imaging technicians, such as sonographers, to be present to perform these examinations. While the physician in charge of the patient may not need to be present in the patient's room, the physician still will be interested in his/her patient's status with respect to these monitoring and/or imaging procedures. In some scenarios, the physician may have other matters to attend to around the hospital, but he/she still may need to advise the medical technician of additional procedures to be conducted or variations on the examination being conducted.
With respect to routine monitoring conducted in a hospital scenario, typically patients are attached to sensors that are used for the monitoring of vital signs. These sensors may be linked to a centralized center where medical personnel may monitor the patient's vital signs remotely. When a centralized center is employed, medical personnel are situated in this centralized center in order to monitor the progress of the patients. If, for example, a physician wants to monitor the patient's progress without entering a patient's room, he/she would need to be located in the centralized center. Accordingly, the physician or other medical personnel in charge of monitoring the patient must identify someone to monitor his/her patient when the physician needs to visit another patient's room or needs to be in a different area of the hospital.
Further, while the physician may monitor his/her patient's vital signs from the centralized center, when imaging procedures, such as ultrasound testing, are conducted, the physician would need to rely on a sonographer. Alternatively, the physician may need to enter the patient's room in order to be certain that the imaging is being performed correctly or to suggest variations on the imaging procedure being performed.
Accordingly, with respect to monitoring and imaging, a physician's movement is limited. The physician needs to either remain in the surgical suite or other location where the procedure or monitoring is being performed while these procedures are occurring or engage in limited monitoring in a centralized center.
In addition, the medical technician performing monitoring and/or imaging procedures within a clinical space demands a display for viewing the output from the monitoring of vital signs, for example, as well as for viewing the output from imaging using an ultrasound scan head. These external displays are typically bulky, taking up a large amount of space, and are generally not positioned close to one another. Thus, the medical technician is forced to shift his/her line of sight to view the displays while performing the imaging procedure, for example.